PESHAWAR, Pakistan: Militants shot dead two Pakistan policemen guarding a polio vaccination team on Tuesday, officials said, as the country confronts a recent resurgence of the disease.
Pakistan and neighboring Afghanistan are the only countries where polio remains endemic and vaccination teams are frequently targeted by militants waging a campaign against security forces.
On Monday, health workers launched a week-long vaccine drive aiming to immunize more than 45 million children over the age of five.
“Two militants attacked policemen guarding a polio vaccination team,” said Malik Sikandar, a senior officer in the northwestern town of Orakzai.
“One policeman died at the scene while the second succumbed to injuries” enroute to hospital, he said, adding that officers chased down and killed the two attackers and a local accomplice.
Another police official, Naveed Ullah Khan, said the two vaccination workers on the team “were inside the home during the attack and remained safe.”
No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, which has long been a hive of militant activity including by the Pakistani Taliban.
The vaccination campaign was paused in the area of the attack but continued elsewhere in Orakzai, police said.
Pakistan has seen a surge in polio cases this year, recording 41 so far in 2024 compared with six in 2023.
“The terrorists’ attack on the polio team is an attack on the safe future of Pakistan,” Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi said in a statement.
Polio vaccination teams, made up of health workers and police guards, have often come under attack in the restive and mountainous regions bordering Afghanistan.
Pockets of Pakistan’s border regions remain resistant to inoculation as a result of misinformation, conspiracy theories and some firebrand clerics declaring the vaccine un-Islamic.
Islamist opposition grew after the US Central Intelligence Agency organized a fake vaccination drive to help track down and kill Al-Qaeda’s then leader Osama bin Laden in Pakistan.
Last month, dozens of Pakistani policemen who accompany medical teams during door-to-door campaigns went on strike after a string of militant attacks targeting them.
Scores of polio vaccination workers and their escorts have been killed over the years.
